Larry Summers Pushes Public-Private Infrastructure Bank Scheme

The former director of the White House National Economic Council, Larry Summers, is pushing Obama’s proposed national infrastructure bank.

“The president’s proposals to create an infrastructure bank, to spend quickly on surface transportation, and to renovate schools are a very good start,” Summers writes for The Daily Beast[1].

But America must demand more. For years we will have an economy with plenty of slack, low borrowing costs, and high unemployment. The specter of a double dip will hover over us if government does not do its part in pushing the economy forward – not just this year, but for years to come. Now is the time not just to do shovel-ready projects, but to envision the backbone we want the American economy to have in 2020 and launch the multiyear plan we need to get there.

Summers believes more spending and public debt will fix an economy destroyed by his bankster buddies on Wall Street. In order to get there, he has proposed taking money out of the private sector and spending it on politically expedient projects.

The so-called “infrastructure bank” proposed by Obama is another public-private boondoggle. Public-private partnerships are essentially fascist, as Mussolini knew (he called it corporatism). According to fascist economics, profit should be private and losses public.

Historian Gaetano Salvemini[2] argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise because “the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise… Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social.”

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Fox News[3] admits this. “According to the jobs legislation the White House released Monday, the bank would guarantee infrastructure project loans, putting taxpayers on the hook for losses.” Obama’s people claim “taxpayer subsidies would be conservatively estimated and structured,” a claim government invariably makes when it prepares to steal more money at gunpoint or heap even more debt on citizen-suckers and their grand children.

In order to get a better idea of how Obama’s corporatist scheme will end up, consider housing insurance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both required massive bail-outs of around $150 billion. House Republican Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) called Obama’s “shovel-ready” scheme “a Fannie and Freddie for roads and bridges.”

Larry Summers is not merely a clueless Keynesian who believes the government will cure all of our economic problems. He is a cynical bankster operative who worked closely with Citigroup to establish the “new economy” that is now destroying the United States. He worked with the Clinton administration and then Federal Reserve boss Alan Greenspan in 1999 torepeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933[4] that placed a firewall between commercial and speculative banking.

Destroying Glass-Steagall “set the stage for the banksters to leverage debt upon debt until the house of cards collapsed,” notes Reagan era economist Paul Craig Roberts[5].

Larry Summers was instrumental in the bankster plan to take down America. Now he is shilling fascist economics and calling for even more debt.